Monday, August 11, 2008

Watching the Olympics in Korea...



It's definitely a different feeling, watching the Olympics away from home for the very first time in my life. I'm not quite sure how to articulate it just yet.

Yesterday, I saw 박태환 win the gold for the men's 400m freestyle swim. While my future uncle patiently sat in the car for a good 20 minutes waiting to take us to the movies, 수정 언니 refused to leave the house until she had a chance to see this race. American Larsen Jensen was competing in the same event. Hmm, I thought silently, first and second, preferably with America on top. That would be perfect. Jensen ended up third. The crowd - 서정 언니 - went wild.

We also watched Phelps take the gold and set a new world record in the men's 400m individual medley. Woooot! Everyone else let out a somewhat nonchalant, "Cool."

I sent this text message to my friend Annie shortly thereafter. "친척들이랑 올림픽 같이 보는게 진짜 웃겨. (Watching the Olympics with my relatives really makes me laugh.) Who do I cheer for? Identity crisis!! ^^"

To which she responded: "ㅎㅎ 그럼 완전 다른 나라를 응원해라. (Then cheer for a completely different country.) Go Argentina!"

Haha.



I suppose you can call it a mix of "Kick Ass, USA!" and "It'd be pretty damn cool if Korea and Japan could win too." The cool thing about watching the Olympics here is that you get to see it live. But a lot of the coverage obviously focuses around Korean athletes and the events they're involved in, which makes it difficult to catch an event in replay, if a Korean isn't involved in it. (NBC is blocking all streaming video to people outside of the US and I haven't figured out how to deal with the proxy stuff to get around it... if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!)

The closest thing I found to the America's amazing comeback in the 4x100m freestyle relay was this, shot off the television:



And the win is analyzed by the NY Times (with dorky graphics that we all love) here.

Go USA! ^______^

2 comments:

InMySeoul said...

Man! You've been busy yesterday/last night! 4 or 5 new posts!

If you have a friend or family in the States that you can rely on to leave their computer up. You can "connect" to their computer using Windows, that essentially lets you control their computer. Use that to access the internet and it will appear to NBC that you have a US based IP address...thats the simplist way I can think of..It would require someone willing to give you complete control of their computer though.

InMySeoul said...

website that shows a few different options:

http://www.sixpica.com/blog/2008/04/07/how-to-access-us-only-websites-from-overseas/

If you have a good friend in the US, you dont have to use a slingbox. You could use a VPN you set up to access the videos via internet.